Lonnie Timmons III, The Plain DealerColumbus-based Jeni's Ice Cream now has a location in Chagrin Falls, and its owner say she hopes it will help spread "pride on Ohio agriculture."

Forget vanilla, chocolate and butter pecan.

OK, so don't forget three of the most popular ice cream flavors in America. But consider some intense variations, such as a vanilla made with rich, cloudlike cream from Ohio grass-fed cows and extra-potent vanilla pods from Uganda.

Or dark chocolate enriched with American-processed cocoa beans fair-traded from Tanzania and the Philippines.

Or a pecan-studded butterscotch mixture with seductive whispers of wheaty, Ohio-made whiskey.

Yes, they're ice creams, but ice creams that reach for the moon -- or at least some of the ripest, most enchanting flavors on Earth.

They're Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams out of Columbus, now with a shop in Chagrin Falls.

Jeni's is different from other ice creams in big ways, including price. A packed pint is $10, easily twice the cost of many premium products.

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"Yeah, we're probably one of the most expensive ice creams around," says Jeni Britton Bauer, founder of 9-year-old Jeni's. "I certainly think we provide a lot of value for that money.

"You may spend more, but you can walk through the shop and taste as many flavors as you want. You can hear a story about each of them.

"As you walk away and lick your cone," she added, "it helps you be there in the moment with the flavor. I hope it's a bigger experience."

Big enough that the family-run business has been riding a comet lately through the foodie world.

Three years ago, Bauer was featured in Food & Wine magazine with an adventurous ice cream recipe using cream cheese. As she expanded her stores, developed her thickening techniques and finding more seasonal, locally sourced flavorings, other national media followed, including Time magazine. The headline in the March issue asked, "Can the best ice cream in America be the biggest?"

Bauer's Chagrin Falls shop opened in April, after she launched seven others in Columbus with her husband (Charly), brother-in-law (Tom Bauer) and attorney friend (John Lowe) -- all supported by up to 250 seasonal and part-time workers. Someone has to hull 25,000 local strawberries each spring.

Lonnie Timmons III, The Plain DealerSavannah buttermint, salty caramel and wild berry lavender are some of the flavors available at Jeni's Ice Cream on North Main Street in Chagrin Falls.

Next month, Artisan Books will publish her first cookbook, "Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams at Home," which already is getting plenty of high-phat praise.

"Jeni surpasses the creativity of all other ice cream makers," says the back-of-the-book blurb from The New York Times.

"Fabulous," agreed writer Molly O'Neill. "The only recipes I know that deliver super-rich, super-creamy confections in home freezers every single time."

Jeni's arrives in Cleveland at a time when the economy may be stalled, but ice cream is still considered an affordable luxury. Sales of super-premium ice creams have slowed a bit, but Jeni's has that advantage called "story." Hers, say those who know her, speaks to artistry, perseverance and the wholesome desires of the local-food movement.

"Nobody else thought of being seasonal with ice cream," said Jonathon Sawyer of the Greenhouse Tavern on East Fourth Street in Cleveland and among the first to snag a regular cache of Jeni's here.

"Beer is seasonal. Certain meats and vegetables are seasonal. But ice cream, people had a hard time thinking about it that way," he said.

Here are some flavors from the new book, showing how Bauer thinks about it: in spring, Roasted Strawberry and Buttermilk, and Baked Rhubarb Frozen Yogurt; in summer, Sweet Corn and Black Raspberry, and Goat Cheese With Roasted Cherries; in fall, Sweet Potato With Torched Marshmallows, and Riesling Poached Pear Sorbet; and in winter, Brown Butter Almond Brittle, and Queen City Cayenne, a chile-spiked chocolate inspired by Cincinnati.

The night she opened the new shop near the falls, Bauer greeted her guests at the door. Against her Vermeer milkmaid's complexion, she sported blocky, Andy Warhol-ish black-framed eyeglasses. Her dress of bold royal blue and white stripes looked inspired by canvases of minimalist modern art -- stripes going in flattering ways.

Bauer paused before she answered each question in a kind of deliberate, Midwestern gathering of thought. She seemed less retailer, more artist, which is her upbringing.

Art and foodgo hand in hand

Born in Peoria, Ill., Bauer moved to Columbus at age 12. She credits her grandmother, an art teacher, with providing unlimited aesthetic and culinary touchstones. She helped as her grandparents tapped acres of trees to make maple syrup, gathered honey from hives, harvested and used all kinds of fruits and vegetables. Art and food seemed inseparable, she said.

She took art and art history at Ohio State University, but got up to her elbows in food while working weekends at Le Chatelaine bakery in Upper Arlington.

"I fell in love with a from-scratch kitchen," she said. "The owners always brought in friends who were some of the biggest names in Paris pastry. They'd make things just for each other.

"Compared to the doughnuts I grew up with, the flavors were less sweet and more real.

"I wanted to work more than I wanted to go to school."

Actually, she wanted to go to pastry school but didn't have the money. Toward the end of college she started Scream, an ice cream business at North Market in Columbus. She had plenty of flavor ideas, pink hair and a business partner, but few business skills. The shop closed.

GEORGE LANGE PHOTOGRAPHYJeni Britton Bauer said she's not worried about giving away ice cream secrets to competitors in a new cookbook. "This business is really hard," she says. "It took me 15 years to get it right."

She regrouped, read a lot about business, took an ice cream short course at Penn State University, interrogated dairy experts at OSU and went back to making croissants at the bakery.

With the help of her new husband, Charly, she earned enough money to buy a new ice cream machine. At first she sold from home on the weekends while her husband watched OSU games. After banging on bank doors for a loan, she opened a shop again, Jeni's.

Not all of her flavors have been successes, she said. Most notably, there was a smoked banana that tasted like turpentine.

"Now I can do it on paper," she said. "Mostly I know how flavors can interact."

It frees her inspirations.

"I start 16 weeks out, putting together ideas," she said. "It always starts with a band or music or style of art. One year I made Marie Antoinette flavors that she would have experienced in the Court of Versailles. This season's violet ice cream with meringue couldn't be a more perfect Marie Antoinette flavor.

"It isn't happening yet, but I'm thinking about Walt Whitman's 'Leaves of Grass,' for a collection."

Finding ways to use best ingredients

Behind these inspirations, behind the science of it and the locally sourced flavors is Snowville Creamery of Pomeroy, Ohio, near Athens. Bauer calls owner Warren Taylor "the Don Quixote of dairymen."

Taylor spent much of his career as a consultant for big companies such as Dannon. In his "retirement," he is working with farmers who raise grass-fed cows free of antibiotics and hormones. He doesn't homogenize, and he pasteurizes milk at the lowest legal temperature to preserve its fresh flavors and nutrients. He calls it "milk the way it used to be."

For Jeni's, he also borrowed some technology from mass-produced cheesemaking. He skims the cream and then micro-filters the remaining milk to remove water. Then he adds those milk solids back to the cream.

"The first thing I do when I'm at the dairy is put on the hairnet and walk over to the cream tank," said Bauer. "When they're mixing the concentrated proteins from the skim milk back into the cream, you get these bubbles of whipped cream floating on the top. It's naturally sweet. I get a glass, dip it in and eat it with the spoon."

"Voluptuous" is the word she uses for what Snowville does for her products.

Taylor says it's mutually beneficial. His sales have gone up 50 percent since working with Jeni's, and he's considering adding a third dairy to the mix.

"That increase is ridiculous in this economy, let alone any other," he said. It has created a market for milk from cows raised on grass, not just those in confined operations. It gives farmers more choice, he says, and a chance to change the food world.

"We need to become the big boys," said Taylor. "Not Walmart or Kroger. Not them, but not small. We have to become bigger without losing our souls."

Getting bigger has a lot of challenges, especially for a woman who heads a company and is also a wife and mother of two toddlers, Greta, 31/2 and Dashiell, 2.

"It's a little chaotic," said Bauer. "I think we like chaos, to be honest. But we have a schedule. We always have breakfast and dinner together, and we have date night once a week.

"Every time we grow a little bit, the rules of the game change," she said. "What we found, early on, was that as we grew a little bit, we got way better opportunities with ingredients.

"I like to be an activist for my suppliers. Growing made it possible to work with Snowville exclusively, and for them to make a huge investment in machinery. And it gave us a partnership so we could make the best ice cream in America, not with powdered milk from New Zealand, or with milk from 6,000 different farms.

"When we opened a second store, it gave us more money to put into ingredients. Even the vanilla beans from Uganda are all from one grower.

"We love our company so much. We love retail and creating an environment around choosing ice cream and eating it.

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